Tempe’s new streetcar line

I visited Tempe, Arizona, last week. I wanted to take a look at Tempe’s new streetcar line, which opened in May of this year. I also wanted to explore some other recent urban projects there.

The context is important. Tempe is part of the Phoenix metropolitan area. Phoenix is arguably the most automobile-oriented of America’s major urban regions. The chief reason for this is surely that Phoenix was a relatively small city as late as the 1950s. Nearly its entire growth—it now has something like five million people—has occurred on the assumption that virtually all travel would be by automobile. As a result, the Phoenix region is spread out over an enormous area. Only tiny parts of the urban area would be considered “walkable” by any definition. (See my earlier post.)

As in other American urban areas of the automobile age, numerous residents of Phoenix—including many people in a position of power—have come to regret the absence of alternatives to automobile travel and have been trying to change course in certain small ways. For example, Phoenix has developed a light-rail system that now has nearly 42 route-kilometers. Pre-Pandemic, Valley Metro’s light-rail line was attracting a reasonable 50,000 riders a day and enjoyed enough support so that extensions, now under construction, have been widely supported. There has also been an effort to revitalize Phoenix’s central business district and to add denser housing stock in certain areas.

Changes in Tempe have been part of this process. Tempe has an advantage over the rest of the Phoenix area. The city is the site of Arizona State University, which, with its 60,000 on-campus students, is one of America’s largest universities. If only because at least some of ASU’s students do not have access to a motor vehicle, Tempe probably has more pedestrians and cyclists than just about any other part of the Phoenix region. A small area along Mill Avenue in downtown Tempe is the site of several student-oriented restaurants, and there are often modest crowds there.

Patrons of Mill Avenue’s restaurant row staring at the non-student photographer. Note the streetcar (a little out-of-focus) in the street to the right.

Tempe’s public officials have been trying to build on this base and to transform the city into a somewhat less automobile-oriented place. A small number of semi-high-rise hotels and apartment buildings have been added to central Tempe in the 21st century without eliciting too strong a NIMBY reaction. Bicycle lanes have been painted on several major streets (but most cyclists still use sidewalks). And, just north of the CBD, Town Lake and the surrounding Rio Salado and Beach Park were created in the 1990s and have been undergoing continuous development in the years since. The park includes recreational paths that connect with trails in much larger Papago Park across a freeway to the north. There is even a pedestrian bridge across the lake. Town Lake and Rio Salado and Beach Park incorporate the bed of the Salt River, an intermittent stream flowing east to west. Several other intermittent streams and canals in the Phoenix area also have paths alongside that are used for walking, running, and bicycling, but most of these paths are pretty bare-boned, while the paths in Tempe are surrounded by developed parkland.¹ Let me add that, despite the presence of all those students, I was struck by the fact that the Town Lake trails were not at all crowded when I was there. I wondered whether the presence of substantial numbers of homeless people in the park, or near it, might have been discouraging use.

Pedestrian bridge across Town Lake.

Giuliano Park along Town Lake, early in the morning. Note the newish apartment buildings and corporate office towers to the left. The emptiness of the park seems to be pretty typical.

Tempe’s streetcar line is an additional product of the attempt to create alternatives to the automobile in Tempe. Like the parks along Town Lake, it is the work of many years. Planning took something like a decade, and the line was under construction for five or six years. It’s now providing service along a route approximately 4.3 km long northbound and 4.8 km southbound, connecting twice with Valley Metro’s light-rail line.²

Map of Tempe and vicinity showing the routes of Valley Metro light rail and the Tempe streetcar as well as pedestrian and bicycle facilities. Nominal scale is 1:30,000. The GIS data are derived from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap (OSM). Some of these files have been heavily edited. Note that, as with other OSM data, the distinction between pedestrian and bicycle routes is somewhat arbitrary. The map can be clicked and enlarged.

Tempe’s streetcar really is a streetcar. Except at the two end-stops, its right-of-way is shared with automobile traffic. And, like most other new American streetcar lines, the Tempe streetcar does not provide particularly frequent or fast service. When I was in Tempe last week, the online timetable said the streetcar was running with fifteen-minute headways on weekdays and twenty-minute headways on Sundays. The schedule now shows twenty-minute headways every day. There are no countdown clocks or posted timetables in the stations. Nor is there signal preëmption. The streetcar spends a noticeable proportion of every journey stopped at red lights. Trips are supposed to take nineteen minutes northbound and twenty-four minutes southbound, which means that the streetcar is running at an average speed of something like 12.7 km/h (7.9 mph). The nicest thing you can say about this is that it’s definitely faster than walking speed.

Streetcars in traffic on Apache Boulevard, south of Arizona State University’s main campus. Note the apartment buildings a few blocks away. Note also the “Bus Bike Walk Rail” banner; these have been posted all over Tempe. The city’s government would like to decrease automobile use in Tempe.  

It’s easy to be cynical about the short streetcar lines that many American cities have installed over the last decade or so. They often have such infrequent and unpredictable service that many patrons would do better to walk. As a result, they typically attract only a small number of customers. Their customer base seems to consist mostly of tourists interested in riding a streetcar rather than of local people who need to get to a particular place at a particular time. Many of these systems appear to have been built largely because decision-makers have felt that their cities needed to have some kind of rail line to be attractive to tourists and investors.

Tempe’s streetcar may be more justifiable than the short lines in certain other cities. It’s been built to be, at least in part, a feeder line for Valley Metro’s light-rail line, whose Tempe stops all lie north of the great bulk of ASU’s spread-out campus. The streetcar runs instead along ASU’s western and southern edges, and its route includes the most heavily built-up parts of Tempe’s downtown as well as newish corporate buildings and residential structures along Town Lake and several mid-rise apartment buildings south of the main campus. Its southeastern terminus is close to Culdesac Tempe, a residential development that’s designed to be car-free: residents will not be allowed to keep cars anywhere nearby.³ It’s easy to imagine that there would be a reasonably large customer base for the streetcar. The fact that it’s quite hot for much of the year in Tempe may also encourage use. It was over 100⁰ F. every day I was there—in late September! The air-conditioning was working quite well on all the streetcars I was on.

A streetcar in downtown Tempe, where there are several substantial buildings.

The streetcar line’s been averaging something like 750 riders a day,⁴ somewhat fewer than the expected thousand or more. It may or may not be significant that the daytime trips I was on all had something like fifteen riders, which suggests a higher overall ridership figure.⁵  Rides are now free (and may thus be hard to count). It’s not clear whether requiring a fare would cut into ridership (especially if students, who seem to make up at least half the streetcars’ ridership, got free passes).

Inside a Tempe streetcar.

A network of fairly well-patronized free bus routes (the “Orbit” system) between Valley Metro’s Downtown Tempe light-rail station and various Tempe destinations has been operating for several years. Orbit serves many more destinations than the streetcar and does so with slightly shorter headways (fifteen minutes on weekdays). The streetcar line has an awkward relationship with the Orbit lines, which (to say the obvious) didn’t cost $200,000,000 to set up.

Tempe’s streetcar line certainly seems at the very least an interesting experiment. It may be a model for the many places where campuses (and other major destinations) are just missed by rail lines. Will it change the balance between automobiles and other transportation modes in Tempe? It’s hard to imagine. Like the rest of the Phoenix region, Tempe remains an extraordinarily automobile-oriented place. It may have taken some steps to create alternatives to the automobile, but there’s not much evidence that these have had a significant impact. Automobiles outnumber streetcars, pedestrians, and cyclists on the streets of Tempe by something like a hundred to one.

When I found myself on a corner standing next to a young cyclist one morning waiting for a slow-to-change red light, I pointed out to her that all the sidewalk bicycling seemed a bit strange to a visitor. She responded with a strongly worded statement on the dangers of cycling in the streets of Tempe. I suspect she had a better sense of how things work in Tempe than, say, a visiting transit enthusiast who might have been inclined to see the opening of the Tempe streetcar as a major event.